BOOK REVIEW : Two Views...

After years of headlines and controversy, the assemblage of biblical scholars known as the Jesus Seminar has found a major publisher for its provocative results. Macmillan’s “The Five Gospels” answers the question, “What did Jesus really say?” in a comprehensive and knowledgeable way for those souls not sharing the official church confidence in the Gospels’ historical reliability.

The answers given by the Jesus Seminar, still being debated, have trickled out in news stories since Robert Funk founded the group in 1985: Only about half of the Sermon on the Mount originated with Jesus, Jesus never predicted the imminent end of the world, and so on.

The Sonoma-based group concluded finally that merely 18% of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament’s four Gospels were his. Stringent criteria eliminated any parables, aphorisms or admonitions that resembled common wisdom of that era. Also ruled out were sayings that seemed to address social situations that developed after Jesus’ time.

By contrast, another large project newly come to fruition--the HarperCollins Study Bible, edited by the nation’s most prestigious association of biblical scholars--is being touted by the publisher as a volume that “avoids a theological bias or religious agenda.” In the same breath, however, HarperCollins says that its annotated Bible “conscientiously encompasses feminist perspectives,” which would strike conservative Christians as a bias.

The Jesus Seminar’s agenda is plainly stated. Funk launched the Seminar partly to confront the literalism of fundamentalists that liberal scholars rarely deign to challenge. He also wanted to push colleagues to decide what words of Jesus were most characteristic of the Galilean teacher.

To be fair, some biblical scholars shied from involvement because they believed most words of Jesus were historically irretrievable. Others believed more harm than good would come of the effort as it played out before the news media. Some disliked the somewhat unscholarly voting technique, which included dropping black balls into a ballot box to reject sayings thought to have been misattributed to Jesus.

True to a goal announced at the outset, the Jesus Seminar has produced a “red-letter Bible” radically differing from some of the King James Version bibles that put all of Jesus’ words in red ink. Only the minority of words that seminar scholars decided Jesus “undoubtedly said or something very like it” were printed in red.

The words printed in pink (or light magenta, if you will) were “probably” what Jesus said, and gray-ink wording denotes “ideas close to those of Jesus.” Black-balled sayings were printed in bold-face letters.

Alas, the Gospel of John, in which the voice of Jesus is very different from that in Mark, Matthew and Luke, received no colored wording except for a single pink--on “no prophet is honored in his own country,” a saying widely attested to in Gospel literature.

The “fifth gospel”--not a part of the Bible and, in fact, discovered only in 1945--is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 Jesus sayings discovered in Egypt among other early manuscripts hidden in a jar. The scholars most enthusiastic bout its value feel it represents the kind collection of sayings that circulated before the narrative framework of the Gospel of Mark became the model for the church’s gospels.

The Gospel of Thomas scores relatively well in Jesus Seminar balloting, but the scholars still rejected many sayings that betray an emerging Gnostic theology that was to bedevil what developed as orthodox Christianity in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries.

With its introductions, descriptive notes and charts, “The Five Gospels” functions as a useful study guide to relationships between the documents. It also offers a new translation, sometimes using language more earthy than that of most versions and using “God’s imperial rule” rather than the masculine-suggestive “kingdom of God.”

The Jesus Seminar participants included big-name New Testament experts such as John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University and James Robinson of Claremont Graduate School. But the 74 names on the seminar’s roster also include some not known for New Testament work, including film director Paul Verhoeven, who contracted with the group for advice on a possible movie about Jesus.

Yet it would be misleading to characterize the seminar, as some have, as simply a maverick bunch far removed from mainstream scholarship.

Three Jesus Seminar regulars contributed to the HarperCollins Bible, a project of the 5,500-member Society of Biblical Literature. They are Ronald Hock of USC, Harold Attridge of Notre Dame University and Dennis Duling of Canisius College. Duling, who wrote the footnotes to the Gospel of Matthew, frequently cites parallel verses in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas--a highly unusual step for any study Bible.

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By comparison with Funk’s production, the Society of Biblical Literature project is a sober accomplishment striving for objectivity and jargon-free explanations. If it has a progressive tinge, it is most noticeable in the New Revised Standard Version translation first published in 1989. The NRSV tries to use inclusive language whenever possible or plausible. Notably, of the 60 contributors to the Study Bible, 10 are women, and three of the four associate editors in the volume are women.

Biblical study guides that do not “push the envelope,” as the expression goes, are certainly available for Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant and evangelical Christians who want inspiration, ethical guidance or a traditional understanding of Christian orthodoxy.

But the enormous activity in academic studies of biblical literature, mostly conducted out of view of the pew, can be tapped occasionally for challenging perspectives, and these two new works aptly fill that role.